Hello again, Curiously, I have just started the XP PC again and now I have the MBAE icon in the task bar and clicking on it confirms the service is running. This is the first I have seen this. I can confirm that since posting the logs above I have not added nor removed any software nor done anything other than normal PC use. And, since there is no support for XP, there have been no OS updates either. I am at a loss to explain this phenomenon and I have been in computing (& programming) long enough to know that systems do not self-repair (at least currently). I have manually stopped and restarted the service several times with no issue. So I trust it is cured but I have absolutely no idea why. I am happy to continue monitoring this issue. Regards